#61 make PDL errors more helpful and useful
In many cases compile time and run time errors from PDL modules
are correct but not very helpful to the user. More verbose messages
that address the actual problem and clearly state what or how
to fix are nice to have.
However, we don't want core PDL routines to get slowed down
by all these messages since all that processing usually must
happen before the actual computation occurs. I propose we
add a compile time constant (to be named later) which could
be used, uniformly, to conditionalize the verbose checks.
When enabled (in the pdl2 shell, for instance) all the helpful
and chatty checks would be one. When disabled, the perl
compiler would optimize away the many checks and yield
better performing PDL routines.
Improvements in PDL performance for small size piddles
would be possible by converting some of our existing
diagnostic checks to use the new constant as the conditional
for which to check.
Renaming subject to clarify. This seems like a good idea but there are a lot of other things to work on as well. Keeping as a reminder...